Coping with Sales Call Anxiety and Its Effects on Protective Actions

We study how salespeople cope with sales call anxiety and find that two tactics ultimately reduce dysfunctional protective actions in selling interactions. That is, situation modification and attentional deployment both moderate the effects of felt physiological sensations and anxiety on protective actions.attentional deployment;coping;sales call anxiety;situation modification

Exploring Emotional Competence: Its effects on coping, social capital, and performance of salespeople

We define emotional competence as a person’s domain-specific working model about how one can appropriately manage one’s emotions within interpersonal situations. Emotional competence is conceived as the integration of seven seemingly unrelated proficiencies: perspective taking, strategic self-presentation of emotions, helping targets of communication accept one’s genuine emotional reactions, lack of guilt when using emotions strategically, fostering self-authenticity, developing an ironic perspective, and incorporating one’s moral code into the self-regulation of emotions. A cluster analysis of responses to measures of the seven proficiencies by 220 salespeople revealed four distinct groups of people. The groups were defined by emotional competence syndromes consisting of combinations of different levels of the seven proficiencies. One group, the highly emotional competent, scored high on all seven proficiencies, a second group scored low on all seven. Two other groups resulted wherein one group was dominated by feelings of guilt in the use of emotions strategically, and the second was characterized by the inability to accept ambiguous and contradictory situations by assuming an ironic perspective. In a test of predictive validity, the highly emotional competent group, but not the others, coped effectively with envy and pride, achieved high social capital, and performed well.coping;emotion regulation;emotional competence;social capital and performance

The Adaptive Consequences of Pride in Personal Selling

Study 1 investigates the beneficial effects of experiencing pride. Pride was found to have two different effects. First, it increases salespersons’ performance-related motivations. Specifically, it promotes adaptive selling strategies, greater effort, and self-efficacy. Secondly, it positively affects organizational citizenship behaviors. Study 2 takes an emotion-process point of view and compares excessive pride (hubris) with positive pride. The results show that salespeople are capable of self-regulating the expression of these emotions via anticipated feelings of fear, shame, and regret. Salespeople in other words are affected by their emotions, but they also are capable of controlling them to their advantage.marketing;hubris;meta-emotions;organizational citizenship behaviors;pride;work motivation

Account Managers Creation of Social Capital: Communal and Instrumental Investments and Performance Implications

Account managers invest in two distinct, compensatory social ties to achieve social capital, namely peripheral knowledge ties and implementation support ties. The first ties require communal investments, which consist of organizational citizenship behaviors and peripheral information sharing. The second ties require instrumental investments that encompass reciprocity norms and strategic information sharing. Hypotheses are tested on a sample of 164 account managers who sell financial products/services to large customers. The findings show that account managers invest in both ties to attain peripheral knowledge accretion and implementation support which in turn result in improved performance.reciprocity;account management;social capital;organizational citizenship behaviors

Cognitive, Emotional, and Sociocultural Processes in Consumption

This article examines deliberative, emotional, and sociocultural processes in consumption. The authors draw upon basic processes from two leading theories in social psychology, the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the model of goal‐directed behavior (MGB), to develop a comprehensive approach to decision making more appropriate for many consumption decisions, and revise the representation and modeling of key variables to better reflect how social psychological processes relate to consumer behavior. A survey was conducted among real adult consumers of bacalhau in Portugal. Because it is most common for women to prepare bacalhau meals in Portugal, 153 female participants were recruited for this survey. The results show that the TPB, and especially the MGB, are found to explain food consumption decisions well but only after the approaches are modified in form and content to accommodate the complex emotional and social aspects of the consumption context. The results also show that the effects of key determinants of desire in the MGB are contingent on the traits of food involvement and cultural orientation (i.e., degree of vertical individualism). The approach taken herein overcomes limitations of existing theories by synthesizing relevant processes across two leading theories and by introducing new variables and processes, thereby showing that the organization of these processes and their contingency on cultural variables regulate consumption.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95524/1/mar20585.pd

Alternative approaches for thinking about and modeling consumer decisions in relationships

Simpson, Griskevicius, and Rothman identify an understudied area in consumer research (namely, decision making in social relationships), propose an important starting point for enquiry (a dyadic framework), and suggest many fruitful moderators for study that can be incorporated in their framework. After pointing out some boundary conditions and opportunities for future research concerning their suggestions, I consider a recent approach in psychology that applies to a relatively circumscribed domain of social relationships (i.e., the social relations model) and then briefly review an emerging approach (plural subject theory applied to goal‐directed behavior) that goes beyond the social relations model and better fits certain psychological and social psychological phenomena in consumer behavior.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141467/1/jcpy315.pd

Philosophical foundations of neuroscience in organizational research : functional and nonfunctional approaches

Neuroscience offers a unique opportunity to elucidate the role of mental phenomena, including consciousness. However the place of such phenomena in explanations of human behavior is controversial. For example, consciousness has been construed in varied and conflicting forms, making it difficult to represent it in meaningful ways without committing researchers to one species of consciousness or another, with vastly different implications for hypothesis development, methods of study, and interpretation of findings. We explore the conceptual foundations of different explications of consciousness and consider alternative ways for studying its role in research. In the end, although no approach is flawless or dominates all others in every way, we are convinced that any viable approach must take into account, if not privilege, the self in the sense of representing the subjective, first-person process of self as observer and knower of one’s own actions and history, and the feelings and meanings attached to these. The most promising frameworks in this regard are likely to be some variant of nonreductive monism, or perhaps a kind of naturalistic dualism that remains yet to be developed coherently

A longitudinal investigation of customer cooperation in services: The role of appraisal of cooperation behaviors

The customer cooperation level in behavior change programs (e.g., weight‐loss programs, alcohol‐quitting programs, and debt management programs) is low, which leads to a low program success rate. To address this problem, this study draws on the goal‐driven behavior theory and develops a theoretical framework to explain how goal intention, and behavioral appraisal processes influence the subsequent cooperation behaviors, which, in turn, influence customers’ goal attainment. A two‐wave longitudinal survey was used to test the theoretical model. Results show that customers’ appraisals of the cooperation behaviors play a vital role in influencing customers’ cooperation behaviors. Three appraisal factors (self‐efficacy, instrumental belief, and affect toward cooperation behaviors) fully mediate the relationship between goal intention and cooperation. Customer cooperation contributes directly to goal attainment. Both theoretical and managerial implications are provided

Multitrait–multimethod matrices in consumer research: Critique and new developments

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141890/1/jcpy143.pd

Testing Hypotheses About Methods, Traits, and Communalities in the Direct-Product Model

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68271/2/10.1177_014662169201600409.pd